med-hints

  In her 2023 Earth Day discussion Heather Cox Richardson told the story of Rachel Carson’s  Silent Spring . “A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT.   It was widely used by farmers and was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.   After the chemical was sprayed on vegetation it washed into the oceans and concentrated in fish.   They, in turn, were eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells that cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them." "In 1962 The New Yorker  serialized Carson’s book and the publisher sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.    In 1967 a number of scientists in the U.S. organized the Environmental Defense Fund .and lobbied for a ban ...

  Like the fictional Gulliver, he became the first to make the voyage, the first to gaze at the unknown world through a powerful lens. A contemporary of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Leeuwenhoek was born in 17th-century Delft. It’s a town in western Holland known for cool, foggy summer mornings, numerous boat-filled canals, wide streets con­nected by wooden bridges, and blue and white pottery. In his day, horses and carts clattered across the stones in front of a large open-air market, narrow rows of houses surrounded the town square, and food and wood were weighed before they were sold. Leeuwenhoek’s father died when he was young and his mother remarried.   She came from a well-to-do brewer’s family.   Her son, Anthony first worked as a draper’s apprentice. When he was 22 he married the boss ‘daughter and they had 5 children, but “only one of them survived childhood.   His first wife died in her 30’s.   Such was health care 300 years ago.   While learning t...